Computing systems typically include a combination of hardware and software. The combination of hardware and software on a particular computer system defines a computing environment. Therefore, different hardware platforms and different operating systems provide different computing environments. The different computing systems or the different operating systems, which implement the different computing environments, may sometimes share certain hardware or software resources. Typically, to share file systems of one computing environment stored on a storage media with the different computing systems implementing same or different computing environments, a method of server-client file system sharing is adopted. In this method, an operating system shares its file system over a network and the other operating system may access the shared file system through a network.
With the advances in technology, computing systems can now be configured to run a plurality of operating systems. Executing the plurality of operating systems on a single computing system allows the system to perform multiple functions. The computing system may employ a hypervisor to manage the plurality of operating systems that each execute on the single computing system. While running multiple operating systems on a single computing system, each of the operating systems share the processor, memory, and other resources of the system. Further, each of the operating systems may have different file systems stored in the memory which has logical partitions for each operating system. Many a times, these different operating systems working on the same computing system require sharing of information that may be stored on different file systems.
Typical hypervisor based solutions use a network based file server approach to share the file system stored on logical partitions of local storage devices. Known methods for sharing information between logical partitions typically use a virtual local area network (VLAN). Using VLAN technology, the logical partitions may communicate with each other on connections that appear to be physical network connections, but in reality are virtual network connections between the logical partitions and the operating system. In certain situations, file system sharing between multiple operating systems is also achieved by using shadow volume techniques.